There is always an element of disturbing discomfort in whatever Aldous Huxley wrote, partly because it is always too intelligent to be completely human. He is too advanced for normal human measures and standards. Here that disturbing element is imminent from the beginning, as the leading characters are thoroughly nasty with each other. Charles Boyer, a rich artist who has had everything gratis in life from the beginning, is married to a dying complaining nightmare of a whining wife, who only stays alive because she knows "how happy her husband would be if she died". She is to be pitied most of all, but everyone here is to be pitied, except the doctor, the only quite human character in this sordid business. The nurse is another monster, being all compassionate with the dying wife, expecting an inheritance from her which she never gets, and reporting a murder when her ladyship is dead, accusing the husband, whom she has hated all along. Then there is Jessica Tandy, and it is her film, all lovable sweetness all the way and the bearer of the Giocondan smile, that is the headline of the story. She has loved Charles Boyer for fifteen years without ever being answered, while she is happily unaware that he has another mistress, Ann Blyth as very young and innocent, playing Doris of eighteen years, whom he marries as soon as the wife is dead. Of course, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.
This is a very dark tale of frustrated passions, of high society accomplished people who can't face themselves in the mirror and are blind to their own shortcomings. Charles Boyer commits the mistake of marrying the wrong woman twice, and he has to pay for it, and so must the poor right woman, who is the real tragedy here.
The drama couldn't be more eloquent and more tragic in its unnecessary development, where everything goes wrong without having to. Jessica Tandy is the only one who really laughs, but even her laugh is just a mask for something of the most bottomless despair...
